


On Impermanence: Xander

by viggorlijah



Series: On Impermanence [5]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, M/M, Rape Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 07:26:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viggorlijah/pseuds/viggorlijah





	On Impermanence: Xander

_If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished, if the crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded, men would hardly feel the pity of things. The beauty of life is in its impermanence. Man lives the longest of all living things... and even one year lived peacefully seems very long. Yet for such as love the world, a thousand years would fade like the dream of one night."_

_Kenko Yoshida, Essays in Idleness (1330-1332)_

 

* * *

 

Xander's adding a picture of Anya to his wallet.

There's one there already, a small black and white that she took for her library card, Anya looking grimly at the camera. She'd handed it to him along with his list of to-do's. My photo in wallet, buy shampoo, call your mother, my dress to drycleaners.

He tried getting pissed at her for alphabetizing the fridge and leaving Oprah affirmations on the bathroom mirror, but he's read the lists she makes, "Ten conversation starters", and she studies for the quizzes in her magazines, underlines paragraphs in the self-help books she buys, so he just laughs and uses the filofax she bought him.

Sometimes he scribbles new to-dos at the end of her lists. Give Xander a blowjob. Steak for dinner. She's figured out they're suggestions, not demands, and if the shop hasn't been too busy and the world isn't ending, he gets steak with a smile. It's good.

Which is why he's putting in a new photo. The black and white goes into the album, a label underneath with the date she gave it to him. The day she said she loved him. He makes a note of that too.

The new photo is from a booth. Four pictures, Anya and him. The traditional stick-your-tongue-out, make a face, quick kiss, and then just Anya grinning, and he's looking at her, not the camera. He folds them carefully, slips them beside the others.

They make his wallet a little difficult to pull out of his back pocket, but hey, that's what cargo pants were made for. That and the extra stake, flask of holy water, cellphone and a bunch of pine-scented amulets.

Mostly photographs, with a couple of clippings. The Magic Shop's ad from the Yellow Pages. A note Cordelia passed him in class. Oz's cellphone scribbled on a bus ticket.

He's got seven shoe boxes in the closet with negatives and albums. Thinks sometimes about arranging them chronologically, but gets lost in looking when he brings them out to do that. His parents' pictures of him growing up fill one album, the free mini-ones you get with a roll of film. Copies of all Willow's pictures. Some that Jesse's parents gave him before they left town. Two boxes of life pre-Buffy.

When Jesse died - no, he reminds himself as he has to each time - when he killed Jesse, he started carrying the last note Jesse wrote him in class. "Bronze 4 U + Will? 8 pm!!" Sitting in ER, empty apartments, waiting for bad news or bad demons, the wallet's meant he has his family with him.

All of them do this. Buffy's mom bought a video camera and has a closet full of tapes. Willow digitizes them onto CDs. But they all carry pictures. Everyone in Sunnydale seems to do it. Town has as many photo labs as cemeteries

In his wallet, it's all mixed up. Mostly group shots to save space. Wesley and Angel trying to scowl while Cordelia grins, the new guy, Gunn, half in the frame as he rushes around the camera. Willow, Tara, Anya and Buffy on the couch. Jesse, Willow and him, twelve years old and laughing. Giles from the school yearbook. He clipped out Larry and Jenny Calendar as well. Two mug shots of Faith and Kendra from the Watchers' files that Wesley managed to get for him without asking questions. Oz just before he left. His parents with his uncle, smiling for the camera. Anya's new pictures.

He spreads them out on his bed. Resorts them and folds Anya's picture in front. She's bound to go through his wallet looking sometime this week, and when she sees the pictures, she'll be pleased. He's looking forward to that.

He leaves Angel's picture out till last.

A headshot, cut out from a group picture, taken a long time ago. Nearly three years now. He tried getting it blown up, but he lost the negative and the picture had creased badly, so Angel's just a tiny thumbnail head. Vampires don't do so well with flashlights, and he's really just a pale oval with a few lines for hair, eyes and mouth. Barely recognizable.

Before Angelus.

He'd never liked the guy that much - taller, darker and way more handsome was bad enough, but he'd done research on vampires. Library time wasn't just for mocking Giles. A couple of books placed out of reach of Buffy, and he'd, well, stolen wasn't the word. Appropriated them. For an evening.

Watchers apparently got off on vampire porn. Demons too, but more arms than an octopus did something to his stomach. The careful ink drawings of vampires did something further south. No photographs; the books were old and he was fairly certain most of them were drawn from memory. What Watchers did in the line of duty.

Which - when he wasn't thinking about Buffy - had been funny in a kinky sort of way until Spike turned up. And he'd felt Angel's teeth brush his neck, gone rock-hard and remembered as Angel held him closer that vampires can sense pheromones.

Maybe he hadn't been down both sides of the street, but he was pretty sure that wasn't a stake in Angel's pocket.

Outside the school, Angel had walked off, his knees had started shaking and he'd known that this was it. Let him walk off and this would be forgotten.

Police cars flashing their lights, the school still blazing with lights, a banner flapping loose against the door. Parents stood around in clusters, Buffy and her mom moving among them, calming them down while Snyder stood at the side, glaring. In a minute, she would look up, she would see Angel can come running over. In a minute, they'd be swallowed up by the crowd, Buffy's mom checking him for bruises, Giles stammering out an explanation - another crazy Sunnydale night.

Angel's duster floated behind him as he walked Xander could see the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck. His hands had been huge and cool on him. When he shifted to gameface, claws had left neat halfmoons on his skin.

"Hey, what's the deal with you being Spike's sire? What's a sire?"

Second thing that came to mind, because he was pretty sure he didn't want to risk Buffy overhearing the first.

Angel disappeared in the shadows, and Xander was just another kid wandering around the school that night. Wandering to the corner where the smokers went, where the bushes could be pushed back to leave just enough space for three or four people to stand.

Angel held the branches back for him, and Xander paused, half-forming the polite "Thank you" then shut his mouth and brushed past him. Leaning against the brick wall, his knees gave out and he trembled, a few violent shudders before he could stand up again.

Angel stood as far away as he could, not moving or speaking while Xander struggled to his feet.

"What do you want?"

"What's a sire?" He already knew. They weren't supposed to do any research on Angel; Giles had quietly locked those books up, but there were plenty of other texts to read.

"Ask Giles. What do you want?"

He's not sure even now if he hates Angel more or less because of the kiss.

Cold mouth, hot tongue, tang of iron. Brick wall against his back, hands combing through his hair, tugging gently while he gave way to Angel's mouth, to Angel's body.

Later, he thought of Buffy, thought of two hundred plus years of experience, who Spike had been to Angelus, the rush of sex after near-death. Still the best damn kiss he's ever had.

Gameface, and he stroked the ridges with his fingertips, heard Angel groan. Tongue travelling down his neck, delicate slice of teeth barely breaking the skin and Xander moaned. Pushed him back, bent himself to the hollow of Angel's throat, his hands pulling up the silk shirt, running feverish-hot over his chest. He'd never wanted to touch so much, felt so naked dressed, bare where he wasn't against Angel, wasn't touching, licking, kissing.

He broke the spell when he whispered "Angel."

His fingers slipped from Angel's mouth, still bleeding, still wet. Angel turned his face and his shoulders shook. When he turned back, he was human-faced again, and staring silently at Xander. His hair was messed and his shirt crumpled. His mouth gleamed in the moonlight.

"I can't," he'd said and Xander had nodded, dumb with desire.

Then he'd been alone, slumped behind the school bushes with the smell of stale cigarette smoke in his clothes and a dozen tiny cuts that had already stopped bleeding.

And twenty minutes more of "Xander Harris: This is your life" went into the closet, with all his Christmases and Buffy dead on the ground and the taste of ash in his mouth when he killed Jesse.

Angel was good about it though. No lingering glances, no stray touches. And maybe, in bed at night, restless from another night of stumbling through a graveyard, he'd want more. Replay the twenty minutes until he couldn't remember exactly how Angel'd kissed him, only the taste.

But between Ampata and Cordelia, he had plenty of practice not thinking about Angel. Or Larry. Or the disturbing number of other men at school. Giles, he'd been relieved to discover, did not feature in his morning dreams. Oz, unfortunately, did.

He studies the photograph, brings out the other one to compare. Willlow took the second one after Angel came back because he couldn't stay in the same room as the vampire for long. It's a better picture; Angel looking straight at the camera, candlelight glowing in the background and he looks like Dorian Grey, perfectly beautiful, perfectly preserved. Buffy's got a copy of the same print.

Grave eyes look up and Xander traces Angel's face. Angelus smiled more, but when he'd finished, when he was lying next to him, talking about all the exquisitely painful things he planned to do, he had the same expression. Thoughtful. Solemn

He'd been grateful for the books then. Knowing what was going to happen made it a little easier. Meant he was prepared, knew which salves, which antibiotics.

Giles noticed what he was reading and went on a doughnut run with him.

Standing on the street in twilight, munching on doughnuts and watching Giles stammer through the questions he'd been expecting for weeks, was kinda funny. What with the icing sugar on Giles' face and the polite euphemisms.

"You mean, is Angelus fucking me?" He kept his face blank. Waited.

Giles didn't try to touch him. Sighed, and looked drained, drained of colour and life, but maybe that was the dusk light, freezing the world before night fell.

"We could send you out of town. To England, even. The Watchers have safe houses."

He hadn't been expecting that and his eyes stung and he had to blink a couple of times before he could speak. "What would you tell Buffy?"

In hospital, she'd been so little. He remembered running to the ER, Buffy incredibly light in his arms. She'd been so little, and everything in the end, came down to Buffy who was so easily broken.

"I can't tell her," Xander said. "He says he'll kill her if I don't. If I go, he might hurt the others."

Which made the sickest kind of sense and Giles had nodded and helped him cover up. Bruises and excuses, notes from Watcher Diaries, bandages and Gile's couch to sleep on.

Later, he'd been able to return the favour. Clearing rose petals from Giles' flat and splinting broken fingers. Picking him up off the bathroom floor and changing bedsheets.

Giles doesn't have any photographs of Angel.

He's okay now. Giles made him talk about it when Angel came back, and since L.A., there've been phone calls there. Wesley taking the phone sometimes when they were both crying too hard, and talking in that calm British voice that sounds like Giles'. He's thinking of going to L.A. to see Cordelia next year. Bring Anya along and let them go shopping and talk about him. They'd get on together.

Because afterwards, it was Cordelia who kissed him with her eyes closed, demanded flowers and compliments, asked him to slip his hand up her shirt, past the lace of her bra. Blushed when they were in the car making out and she wanted to go down on him. Didn't complain, but look relieved when he wouldn't, couldn't sleep with her.

And Oz didn't spend the night, but left early the next morning, leaving some kind of peace, true, but it was Anya who spent the night. Anya who lives with him, wakes him up from his occasional nightmares. Anya who demands he tell her everything, listens to the end and then does her thing.

He tucks the second photograph behind Anya's.

So it's weird. Ropes, spanking, the dildoes, the stack of specialized videos. But he can stand in front of a mirror now, without flinching. Anya bought gold glitter lube last week, and she fingerpainted all his scars. Turned him into a strange swirling creature, pain transmuted to gold.

She makes him feel like a man.


End file.
